Virgil’s Palinurus was Aeneas’s helmsman who fell victim to the god of sleep. His namesake in this complex, beautiful novel, is also a guide to a novel that straddles the conscious and subconscious, life and death. A combination of Dante’s Virgil, Lemuel Gulliver and the little prince, Palinuro leads readers through congeries of cultural and medical reference. Having been raised largely free of a “”disgust for life,”” Palinuro, his beloved cousin Estefania and pedantic cousin Walter describe the body in detail that both repels and enchants. On the face of it, this is the story of Palinuro, a more or less contemporary medical student who lives with his cousin Estefania, and an overheated imagination. But it is also about the power (and powerlessness) of words to define and influence. Palinuro’s obsessive fantasizing about the personal life of objects in his room (including an unbeatable passage on the dying days of

Set in the port city of Santa María, “The Shipyard” follows the story of a man named Larsen, a former shipyard worker who tries to revive a useless and abandoned shipyard. Bringing the shipyard back to life and winning the heart of the shipyard’s owner Petrus’s daughter is, for Larsen, the last opportunity to find his purpose in life. However, the attempt soon becomes a meticulous farse: there is nothing to do in a stagnant, ruined shipyard, nor is it possible to will oneself to love. Even though life precludes it, Larsen continues undaunted in his role, as though he doesn’t want to look at the reality of a world en route to extinction, or perhaps because pretending is the only possible way out of the madness. This classic Latin American novel explores themes of isolation, disillusionment, and the search for meaning in life. In The Shipyard, Onetti omes close